can we be freereally? if our mothers are mud? if deadcolumbus keeps cursing us& nothing changeswhen we curse back

we are a proud resilient peoplethough we return to dust dailysalt gray clay with hot black tearssavor snot cakesover suicide

we are hungrycreative peoplesip bits of laughterwhen we are thirstydance despite

this asthmacalled debtcongestinglegendarily liberatedlungs

-Lenelle Moïse

Used by permission.

····

Lenelle Moïse hailed “a masterful performer” by GetUnderground.com, is an award-winning "culturally hyphenated pomosexual" poet, playwright and performance artist. She creates jazz-infused, hip-hop bred, politicized texts about Haitian-American identity and the intersection of race, class, gender, sexuality, spirituality and resistance. In addition to featured performances in venues as diverse as the Louisiana Superdome, the United Nations General Assembly Hall and a number of theatres, bookstores, cafes and activist conferences, Lenelle regularly performs her acclaimed autobiographical one-woman show WOMB-WORDS, THIRSTING at colleges across the United States.

····Moïse will be featured at Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness, March 10-13, 2010, in Washington, DC. The festival will present readings, workshops, panel discussions, youth programming, film, activism - four days of creative transformation as we imagine a way forward, hone our community and activist skills, and celebrate the many ways that poetry can act as an agent for social change. For more information: info@splitthisrock.org.

Please feel free to forward Split This Rock Poem-of-the-Week widely. We just ask you to include all of the information in this email, including this request. Thanks!

Thursday, November 19, 2009

Dear friends of Sam Hamill and Gray Foster, Copper Canyon Press, and Poets Against the War:

You may have heard that Sam and Gray have had some financial reverses lately. Both have also have had recent hospital stays and still need treatment not covered by insurance. Because of impaired hearing, Sam can no longer teach classes. He survives on his pension but has no room for emergency expenses.

We think that their friends will want to help Sam and Gray get through a difficult patch, and that's why we are raising funds in their behalf. No contribution is too small, and the names (though not the amount of donation) will be given in a few weeks to Sam and Gray, along with the total of contributions. Because of the emergency, donations must be received before the end of November. This kind of fund doesn't qualify for tax-exempt status, so we suggest that those for whom this is a concern first determine the amount they would like to donate and then deduct from it the figure they estimate they would save if the contribution were deductible.

Alfred has set up an account for the fund and checks or money orders (in U.S. dollars) should be made out in his name (you can write in on the memo line “for Sam Hamill”) and sent to:

Mr. Alfred CornP.O. Box 214Hopkinton, RI 02833U.S.A.

This effort is probably best described not as charity but as compensation for unpaid labor involved in the founding and management of Copper Canyon Press and the website Poets Against the War, both extraordinary achievements for which we would like to show gratitude.

Thank you for your interest and cooperation.

Sincerely,

Alfred CornMarilyn Hacker

**

And if you're in the Boston area, head on out for a poetry extravaganza tomorrow night in support:

It would only go a little bit of the way toward making up for all the pain Chase and the other huge banks have wrecked in people's lives, but imagine Chase supporting truth-telling poetry. Imagine Chase supporting poetry that calls out the corporate thugs (like Chase) who stole the common wealth. Imagine Chase supporting poetry that celebrates the beauty and dignity of everyday extraordinary lives.

You can make it happen by voting for Split This Rock to receive Chase charitable support! Just click the button above.

Respectfully, I suggest inclusion of poetic language by reading a poem or excerpt in White House discussions regarding military decisions, particularly now about Afghanistan .

The poetic language takes people past the generic abstractness of numbers—40,000 troops contemplated for Afghanistan , for example—to awareness about every single one of these troops. The tragic beauty of the poetic language provides a compelling visual of a battle scene and what happens to the individual serviceperson.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow moves us when he writes about a young Civil War soldier, “Killed at the Ford,” in the first stanza:

Killed at the Ford

He is dead, the beautiful youth,

The heart of honor, the tongue of truth,

He, the life and light of us all,

Whose voice was blithe as a bugle-call,

Whom all eyes followed with one consent,

The cheer of whose laugh, and whose pleasant word,

Hushed all murmurs of discontent.

In “Anthem for Doomed Youth” the poet Wilfred Owen, killed in action at age 25, November 4, 1918, a week before the Armistice, asks…

What passing-bells for those who die as cattle?

Only the monstrous anger of the guns.

Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle…

We have abundant resources for appropriate and moving language about war: Matthew Arnold’s “ Dover Beach ,” Carl Sandburg’s “Wars” and Herman Melville’s considerable poetry about the Civil War. In “ Gettysburg ,” Melville tells us “The evening sun/ Died on the face of each lifeless one.”

There is the informing those who survive like the parents being called to the porch in Walt Whitman’s “Come Up from the Fields Father,” which could be a national memorial poem:

Come up from the fields father, here’s a letter from our Pete,

And come to the front door mother, here’s a letter from thy dear son.

...

Down in the fields all prospers well,

But now from the fields come Father, come at the daughter’s call,

And come to the entry mother, to the front door come right away

Open the envelope quickly,

O this is not our son’s writing…

O a strange hand writes for our dear son, O stricken mother’s soul!

…While they stand at home at the door he is dead already,

The only son is dead…

I am inspired to make this appeal, Mr. President, by your having revived the tradition of a poet writing and reading a poem at the Inauguration.

day and night, call her to sing along, call her to mature, to envision—

T

hen, she will make herself over. My song will make it so

When she grows far past her self-considered purpose,

I will sing her back, sing her back. I will sing. Oh, I will—I do.

America, I sing back. Sing back what sung you in.

-Allison Hedge Coke

Used by permission.

····

Allison Hedge Coke holds the Distinguished Paul W. Reynolds and Clarice Kingston Reynolds Endowed Chair of Poetry and Writing at the University of Nebraska, Kearney, and directs the Reynolds Reading Series & Honoring the Sandhill Crane Migration Literary Tribute Retreat.She has authored five books including the American Book Award winning volume Dog Road Woman and the Wordcraft Writer of the Year for Poetry volume Off-Season City Pipe, both from Coffee House Press.Hedge Coke came of age cropping tobacco and working fields, waters, and factories.····Hedge Coke will be featured at Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness, March 10-13, 2010, in Washington, DC. The festival will present readings, workshops, panel discussions, youth programming, film, activism - four days of creative transformation as we imagine a way forward, hone our community and activist skills, and celebrate the many ways that poetry can act as an agent for social change. For more information: info@splitthisrock.org.

Please feel free to forward Split This Rock Poem-of-the-Week widely. We just ask you to include all of the information in this email, including this request. Thanks!

KH: Your work as a doctor shows up in the content of your work. Other than providing material, how do medicine, or science in general, and poetry intersect for you? What comes of those intersections?

FJ: The language of medicine, with its Greek and Latin obsessions, is fascinating. It was also quite metaphorical in its nascent days, in the 18th century for example; even if it likes to denounce that flowery lexicon and pretend a kind of certain specificity, it was originally bound to metaphor and translation in order to achieve a sense or illusion of inevitability, of objectivity, of truth. In that manner it resembles many aspects of poetry. Of course medicine is far more utilitarian than poetry is. Still medicine is a window into the dialogue between power and knowledge, and the politics of knowledge, from which poetry is not exempt. I think Foucault’s The Birth of the Clinic or Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor are each a case-in-point.

Fady Joudah's The Earth in the Attic won the Yale Series for Younger Poets in 2007. Contest judge Louise Glück describes the poet in her foreword as, “that strange animal, the lyric poet in whom circumstance and profession ... have compelled obsession with large social contexts and grave national dilemmas.” He is the winner of the 2008 Saif Ghobash – Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation for his translation of poetry by Mahmoud Darwish collected in The Butterfly’s Burden, published in a bilingual edition by Bloodaxe Books in the UK and by Copper Canyon Press in the US. The US edition was short-listed for PEN America’s poetry in translation award in 2009. His most recent translation is of If I Were Another: Poems by Mahmoud Darwish, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009). He was a field member of Doctors Without Borders in 2002 and 2005.

Katherine Howell is a poet, the Communication and Development Assistant for Split This Rock, and a Lecturer in Writing at the George Washington University. She lives, writes, and teaches in Washington, D.C. You can read her reviews of Split This Rock featured poets here.

Yvette Neisser Moreno will lead the discussion on Thursday, November 19. She is a poet and translator whose work has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including The International Poetry Review, The Potomac Review, Tar River Poetry, and Virginia Quarterly Review. Her translation (from Spanish) of Argentinian poet Luis Alberto Ambroggio's Difficult Beauty: Selected Poems was published by Cross-Cultural Communications earlier this year. In addition to working as a professional writer/editor, Moreno teaches poetry and translation at The Writer’s Center and has taught poetry in public schools in Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, D.C.

Free and open to the public.The Writer's Center is wheelchair-accessible.The Earth in the Attic is available for purchase for $16 at The Writer's Center and Busboys and Poets.

Fady Joudah - an award-winning poet, translator of Mahmoud Darwish (most recently of the work If I Were Another), and member of Doctors without Borders - will be a featured poet at the 2010 Split This Rock Poetry Festival. The Earth in the Attic won the Yale Series for Younger Poets in 2007.

The Writer's Center cultivates the creation, publication, presentation, and dissemination of literary work. We are an independent literary organization with a global reach, rooted in a dynamic community of writers.

Monday, November 16, 2009

The prize is open to emerging and established Asian American poets. The award of $2,000, publication of the winning manuscript, and sponsorship of a reading make this a highly desirable prize.

Submissions are accepted from November 15, 2009 to January 15, 2010. Guidelines for submission are available here.

Alice James Books is a cooperative poetry press with a mission is to seek out and publish the best contemporary poetry by both established and beginning poets, with particular emphasis on involving poets in the publishing process.

Kundiman was founded in 2002 to provide opportunities for Asian American poets to perfect their skills through education and performance and to promote Asian American literature as a vital part of American letters. Its programs include a summer poetry retreat, held annually since 2004 and a reading series in New York City.

Kundiman’s partnership with Alice James Books for The Kundiman Poetry Prize is made possible through the support of Fordham University.

Saturday, November 14, 2009

Tara Betts is the author of Arc and Hue, a Cave Canem fellow, and a graduate of the New England College MFA Program. Her work appears in numerous anthologies and journals such as Ninth Letter, Callaloo, Hanging Loose, Gathering Ground, Bum Rush the Page, and both Spoken Word Revolution anthologies. She represented Chicago twice at the National Poetry Slam, coached youth who went on to Brave New Voices, and appeared on HBO's "Def Poetry Jam". She currently teaches at Rutgers University and leads community-based workshops. She will be reading tomorrow at Sunday Kind of Love

How did you come up with the title? What does Arc & Hue mean?

The title, Arc & Hue, is culled from a poem in the first section about a little boy and I drawing on the sidewalks outside my mother’s house in Kankakee, IL. I kept thinking of how, as adults, we try to construct these moments so that children have, and hopefully later, recall having positive experiences with us. I know that’s where the poem came from, but when the collection came together the last line of the poem embodied all that longing and potential nostalgia that is easily wiped away. This book grapples with that feeling of holding on to memories we create and letting them go to make room for the rest of our lives. Some people have also hinted that Arc & Hue are two words that describe a woman of color. I appreciate, this, but it was not intentional in writing this book or the poem.

Abdul Ali is a poet and writer living in the District of Columbia. A native New Yorker, his work spans the malleable spheres of personal and public and pays particular attention to cityscapes, and the urban experience. He’s the proud papi of a five year-old daughter. He is the new Split This Rock Program Associate. You can read the rest of this interview at his blog, Words Matter

Friday, November 13, 2009

When the shooting beganEveryone ran to the trucksGrabbed whatever their backs neededAnd made for the trucksExcept K

And they begged him to get onThe ones who ran to the trucksBut he refused them all

Later they found himOn the road runningAnd howling and stillHe refused them allSince he knewHis legend would grow

Then sightings beganHe was clothed or nakedCooking or sleepingEating or drinking whatThe others gave him

And their begging remained the sameThe trucks going loadedThen coming back empty the sameUntil it was forgottenWhen K had first lost his mind

Before the shooting startedOr much worse after

One thing for sureK is realSafe and sweet especiallyHolding a baby to sleepOr asking for a sip of your FantaOr calling out your name from where

You cannot see him

- Fady Joudah

Excerpt from The Earth in the Attic by Fady Joudah, YaleUniversity Press, 2008.Used by permission.

····

If you are in the DC-area, please join us on Thursday November 19th, as Joudah's work will be the topic of a discussion led by translator and poet Yvette Neisser Moreno - the first in a series of book discussions brought to you by Split This Rock and The Writer's Center.

Fady Joudah'sThe Earth in the Attic won the Yale Series for Younger Poets in 2007. Contest judge Louise Glück describes the poet in her foreword as, “that strange animal, the lyric poet in whom circumstance and profession ... have compelled obsession with large social contexts and grave national dilemmas.” He is the winner of the 2008 Saif Ghobash – Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation for his translation of poetry by Mahmoud Darwish collected in The Butterfly’s Burden, published in a bilingual edition by Bloodaxe Books in the UK and by Copper Canyon Press in the US. The US edition was short-listed for PEN America’s poetry in translation award in 2009. His most recent translation is of If I Were Another: Poems by Mahmoud Darwish, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009). He was a field member of Doctors Without Borders in 2002 and 2005.····Joudah will be featured at Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation and Witness, March 10-13, 2010, in Washington, DC. The festival will present readings, workshops, panel discussions, youth programming, film, activism - four days of creative transformation as we imagine a way forward, hone our community and activist skills, and celebrate the many ways that poetry can act as an agent for social change. For more information: info@splitthisrock.org.

Please feel free to forward Split This Rock Poem-of-the-Week widely. We just ask you to include all of the information in this email, including this request. Thanks!

Hosted by Katy Richey and Sarah BrowningCosponsored by Busboys and Poets and Split This RockOpen Mic at each event! – Admission free, donations encouragedFor more info: BusboysandPoets.cominfo@splitthisrock.orgSplitThisRock.org, 202-387-POET

Come to this creative audio-visual mix that will both move and enlighten you. The progressively spectacular art of the renowned Beehive Collective is coming to DC to join forces with the powerful social justice poetry of Mark Nowak. The theme of this blend of sight and sound display will address the true cost of coal and how regular people are challenging its impact.

In a rare evening you won't want to miss, "The Hive" and Mark will captivate you with their artistic genius reflecting a passion for social justice.

Because space is limited please pre-register here. A suggested donation of $5 would be appreciated for the travel and lodging expenses of the Beehive Collective but no one will be turned away for lack of funds.

November 18th, 2009, 6:30 - 9:00pm

1112 16th Street NW, Suite 600Washington DC

The Beehive Collective is appreciated internationally for its educational graphics campaigns, at a regional level for its stone mosaic murals and apprentice program, and locally for its dedication to the revitalization of the old Machias Valley Grange Hall, a landmark building in their small, rural town. The Hive has been going and growing since 2000, at full speed! Their most recent campaign is exposing the cost industry's strip mining injustices in the Appalachia.

Mark Nowak, Director of the Rose O'Neill Literary House at Washington College, will read from his recent book, Coal Mountain Elementary. A singular, genre-defying treatise from one of America's most innovative political poets, Coal Mountain Elementary remixes verbatim testimony from the surviving Sago, WV miners and rescue teams, the American Coal Foundation's curriculum for schoolchildren, and newspaper accounts of mining disasters in China with photographs of Chinese miners taken by renowned photojournalist Ian Teh. Check out his blog here.

In 1999, Eric Krochmaluk, a man with intellectual disabilities from Middletown, N.J., was kidnapped, choked, burned with cigarettes and abandoned in a forest.

Some people worry that the recently signed hate crimes law will inhibit free speech by making it possible to prosecute an individual on the basis of his or her beliefs or speech. Yet, the legislation has provisions that ensure that prosecution would be based only on violent acts based on bias.

Disabled or gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender people don't want to hinder freedom of speech. We just don't want to become the victims of hate crimes.

No one will be prosecuted simply for exercising the freedom of speech. And that is how it should be, even if that speech is ugly and bigoted.

But once someone commits a violent crime against us because of who we are, that person's bigoted intentions ought to be penalized. Judges and juries, at sentencing, often take into consideration the frame of mind of the criminal. They should do so with these crimes, too. The community has a right to say that bigoted violence is especially corrosive.

The Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act won't end bias-based crimes. But it will put everyone on notice that such crimes will not be tolerated.

And for those of us who are vulnerable, it makes us a little less fearful today than we were yesterday.

That's something that all Americans should celebrate.

Kathi Wolfe is a poet and writer for Progressive Media Project, a source of liberal commentary on domestic and international issues; it is affiliated with The Progressive magazine.

Wednesday, November 4, 2009

The first time I saw these activists turnedacrobats, I was immobilized as they archedthrough hoops, twisting like DNA.These bodies in strength formationsinvoking geology. They carry

something sacred and fragile, bypassingfear. I hitchhiked, feverish as we journeywithout a roadmap to the core.

I could feel motion as thoughit were my own, a brief symbiosis.

And even though I shouldn’t, I go backto rubber necking the crash siteof my own body, mesmerizedby how it flew.

You said that accomplishment is just that,a simple stretch that grows in your own mindto mean more. It’s a two minute airplane ride,three bodies regrouping, proneon a leather bar floor because we believein each other, because

we are all crippled by the world we walk in.The way experience aligns us into living poems:

land masses of tears, beaches made beautifulin our mind’s eye. Tonight, it’s justone fear conquered,one wound buried,the ligaments of usextended and holding. And that is everything.

- Natalie Illum

Excerpt from “After Brand New Highway” from On Writer’s Block and Acrobats (2006), used by permission.

••••

Natalie Illum is an activist, writer and federal employee. Natalie is a founding board member of mothertongue and promotes queer and marginalized writers, musicians, and artists through 3Word Productions. She also facilitates poetry and activism workshops in a variety of community venues. Natalie is in the process of adapting her unpublished memoir, Spastic, to the stage with the help of renowned performance poet and director Regie Cabico. She is currently ranked 25th at the Women of the Worlds Poetry Slam.

••••

Illum will be featured at Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness, March 10-13, 2010, in Washington, DC. The festival will present readings, workshops, panel discussions, youth programming, film, activism - four days of creative transformation as we imagine a way forward, hone our community and activist skills, and celebrate the many ways that poetry can act as an agent for social change. For more information: info@splitthisrock.org.

Please feel free to forward Split This Rock Poem-of-the-Week widely. We just ask you to include all of the information in this email, including this request. Thanks!

Split This Rockwww.splitthisrock.orginfo@splitthisrock.org202-787-5210

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Blog This Rock

The blog of Split This Rock, the national network of socially engaged poets. Programs include a biennial national festival, readings, workshops, contests, the Freedom Plow Award for Poetry & Activism, e-publishing, youth programs, and campaigns that integrate poetry into movements for social change.

About Me

Blog This Rock is a community forum sponsored by Split This Rock, an organization that calls poets to the center of public life and celebrates and promotes socially engaged poetry.
You are invited to our nation’s capital for our next poetry festival in March 2016.
Split This Rock Poetry Festival will feature readings, workshops, panel discussions on poetry and social change, youth programming, films, parties, and activism—a unique opportunity to hone our activist skills while we assess and debate the public role of the poet and the poem in times of crisis.